Do you need a Spider-Man suit – fast – while flying to London on a super-sonic jet in the hope of saving the world from a giant Super Uber Elemental?
I thought so.
It was something Image Engine was tasked with for Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is soon available on DVD and Blu-ray.
Here, Image Engine visual effects supervisor Joern Grosshans reveals how the studio showed Peter Parker building a new suit in the jet lab as the film’s climax begins to ramp up.
Joern Grosshans: The first brief from [production visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs] was something like a 3D printer style kind of approach. We started with that and in parallel we also looked for other references and came up with this big weaving machine. And we also did some designs for the underlying suit, the white suit, which would be like a protection layer under his red and black Spider-Man suit. The brief grew a bit and Janek said, ‘Let’s have something more macro’. So we came up with other full-CG shots where we just got very close on the eyes and on the chest patch when the iconic Spider-Man logo is patched in.
There was an existing model of the suit, but because we were so super close on it and because we had to disassemble it in order for it to be re-assembled with the small robot arms, we really had to re-build the suit so that it held up in close-up. For the nozzles and robot arms, we used medical robot arms as reference. Basically, you want to nail the look and design, and the look and feel of the Stark tech. That’s very important. You can’t introduce another design language, so you have to stay in the design language, which is established over the last 20-plus movies.
For the workshop there had been a set built, but we replaced sections of it because different parts were forming. For instance, we added in a bunch of robot arms and the graphics. For the door opening, we had to come up with a mechanical animation design, working out, how did things open up so it still looks realistic but also kind of Stark-tech futuristic, so that it would make sense in this reality.
Check out befores & afters other Spider-Man: Far From Home visual effects coverage here.
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